One of the departments at my work has a great need for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, especially collaborative calendering and communications tracking (when meetings are, log of all communication between team members and customers, etc.) Note that I am NOT looking for "Content Management Systems (CMS)", although I wouldn't complain if the CRM solution contained a CMS solution as a subset of it.

Being too small to buy a commercial CRM solution, the department is trying to convince management to assign developers to develop an in-house solution. Ick! I'd much rather install something than develop it from scratch, having never even used a CRM solution.

What is available that I can put on our office Gentoo server to fill this need? I've searched the portage tree, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of CRM. I tried some packages like 'eGroupware' that are categorized as CMS tools, but they were all too unstable an incomplete. I did some googling and found SugarCRM, which seems to have an open-source version--but there's no ebuild for it! Is SugarCRM worth manually installing? Is there better stuff out there? Do any of you have suggestions for what to do for CRM?

Last edited by peaceful on Tue Jan 31, 2006 7:58 pm; edited 1 time in total

Here we are using Vtiger (~SugarCRM), i arrived recently and had to migrate to the newest version .. unfortunately that wasn't without some annoying stupid bugs. After a few days of debugging the crappy undocmented and unconsistant PHP code i realize this was a .0 version and many patches were realeased in the mean time.

Apart from that it is decent and stable.

Developing your own CRM is way overkill. At least present some OS CRM solutions keeping in mind that if one doesn't match exactly your company's need it will be not that hard to hack a "in-house fork" (as i had too).

Now maybe your company just have too much money to sit on, (months of dev/feature add + maintain thousands of line of code for a full team of developers OR one week hacking + maintain a hundred line of code modification for 1 or 2 devs...)_________________"Because two groups of consumers drive the absolute high end of home computing: the gamers and the porn surfers." /.
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Update: I've downloaded and installed SugarCRM. It was surprisingly straghtforward (unzip in the webroot, change ownership to apache, run through online configuration). I have encountered a few errors and warnings, the worst of which I was able to fix (enable allow_url_fopen in php.ini).

Right now, SugarCRM-6.4.0 is in portage (while 6.5 is out) - no vtigerCRM. Is there an overlay?_________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

I'm at a point where it's clear that our company needs a better organisation - the question is, what CRM would suit us best. Now, what I've seen in various demo modes was a bit scary - bloated web interfaces that we and our staff would need to work around, not least because of lots of unasked-for features (for a very small business) - while many ideas that I have for improving our workflow would need to be implemented via an extension anyway...

I've found an old bug containing a vtigercrm ebuild - it needs a lot of work but would be doable: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199875_________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic